Vowing more transparency, Mass. Senate moves to make more votes public, require summaries of all bills
The changes follow a session in which lawmakers
'We strongly believe that these rule changes continue to enhance the [Legislature's] transparency,' said state Senator Joan Lovely, a Salem Democrat who headed the committee that wrote the package. 'We want the public to be engaged, involved and be able to have . . . information online and available to them.'
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Any changes lawmakers adopt would amend the internal rules the Legislature creates for itself, not actual law. Each chamber proposes, and passes, rules that govern its operations, but traditionally, the House and Senate also pass what are known as joint rules that cover both chambers and, thus, require approval by both.
Senate leaders released a variety of plans Thursday: They're seeking to make all Senate and joint committee votes and testimony available to the public; currently they are not for joint committees. The new rules also would require the Senate
to publicly post summaries of any bills
reported out by the chamber's budget committee, through which most major legislation flows.
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They're among the changes state Senate President Karen E. Spilka previewed
The Senate is also proposing that every lawmaker file what the rules describe as a 'comprehensive' summary of their bills to help the public better track what legislation would do. Lovely said the summaries the Senate has provided in the past include a breakdown of the bill's major elements and where 'there's a fiscal impact,' should it pass.
Senator Paul Feeney, an Attleboro Democrat, said the change is in response to complaints from residents that they 'just want to see in plain English what [a bill] actually does.'
'They look at a bill, they see the bill number, they see the title, but then there's just kind of a lack of understanding [of] exactly what it does,' Feeney said. 'This is a significant piece to increase transparency.'
The Legislature has operated under a rule first established in the mid-1990s that calls for lawmakers to wrap up formal sessions at the end of July in the second year of its two-year session.
The Senate's rules package would keep the July 31 deadline for approving some bills in formal sessions. But the new rules seek to allow votes after July 31 and through the end of the two-year session on so-called conference committee reports — agreements on major bills that are hatched in negotiations between both chambers, usually in secret,
and are designed to reconcile differences between similar bills passed by the House and Senate.
If approved, it'd be a
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The Senate is also seeking to give lawmakers, and the public, at least 24 hours to review a conference committee agreement between when it's filed and when a vote occurs.
Currently, lawmakers can file a deal by 8 p.m. and a vote can occur as early as 1 p.m. the next day, though lawmakers also routinely suspend that rule — and others — amid their late-session crunch to pass legislation.
The Senate is also seeking to change the operations of the Legislature's joint committees, the panels of Senate and House members that take testimony on bills and vote on whether they should advance for a possible vote in the full chambers. The chamber's proposal would keep the committees together, but allow senators to vote and advance their chamber's bill and the House to do the same with theirs.
Senator Will Brownsberger, a Belmont Democrat, said 'a lot of the opacity that people may perceive around committee process' is rooted in disagreements between House and Senate members about what legislation should emerge from the committee for potential votes by the full House and Senate.
'But this,' he said, 'would situate the accountability clearly on each chair, and so people would know how the decisions were being made, because they would know who was making the decisions as to which bills are being released.'
Mariano told reporters Monday that he was opposed to splitting up joint legislative committees into separate House and Senate panels.
Though rare in federal and other state governments, joint committees dominate the Massachusetts Legislature, which has no fewer than 33 joint panels stocked with lawmakers from both chambers.
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These joint committees do much of the front-line policymaking work, hearing comments on bills introduced in either chamber and deciding whether to advance them.
This decades-old structure is dominated by House members, who hold more seats on every joint committee because there are more House lawmakers (currently 158) than Senate lawmakers (40). The imbalance has long been
'It's not my intention to separate the committees,' Mariano, a Quincy Democrat, said this week. 'A change in separating the committees is very, very significant and requires an awful lot of prep work that has to be done.'
The power struggle is not new to Beacon Hill. In 2015, festering conflict between Senate president Stanley C. Rosenberg and House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo came to a head when the Senate considered a 'nuclear option' of withdrawing from some or all of the joint committees and setting up independent Senate panels.
The chambers last session also did not reach an agreement on a joint rules package.
Also tucked into the Senate's own rules proposal is a provision to allow senators to continue to vote remotely on legislation, a change that was adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since been scrapped by the House and
Lovely said the Senate kept the rule to allow senators who need to be home because they're sick, or have a sick family member, to be able to participate.
'We see this as a plus to the way we operate,' she said.
Matt Stout can be reached at
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